Database

A Datacenter Operating System For Data Developers

By Adrian Bridgwater, December 09, 2014

With a DCOS, developers and operators no longer need to focus on individual virtual or physical machines

With the increasing focus on cloud and datacenters, we are seeing a new ecosystem of technologies flourish that are devoted to "coding in the cloud" (or via service-based application tools delivery) and software layers that reside in other non-premise locations. Logically enough then, we hear talk of datacenter operating systems.

Mesosphere's highly creative marketing function is happy to claim to be the "world's first datacenter operating system" — so that's DCOS if you're collecting acronyms, and yes, there is a developer message.

"The industry needs a new type of operating system to optimize and automate
the complex landscape inherent to the agile IT era: A growing fleet of distributed web, mobile, analytic server applications, operated as application-centric abstractions on commodity server and storage pools in dedicated datacentres and public clouds," claims Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, an investor in Mesosphere.

"In this environment, existing virtualization or orchestration software [offerings] are insufficient to deliver on the end goals: abstract complexity, optimize utilization, and simplify or eliminate human intervention in the face of dynamic failures, demand surges, constant provisioning, and upgrades. Mesosphere has assembled a team to deliver this software foundation that makes it as easy to run massive distributed server applications as it is to run an app on your smartphone or PC."

With a DCOS, developers and operators no longer need to focus on individual virtual or physical machines but can easily build and deploy applications and services that span entire datacentres. This DCOS approach to programmable datacentres — managing datacenters and clouds at web scale — has helped drive the success of Internet giants like Google and Twitter, as well as the hyper-growth of young companies like Airbnb and Hubspot.

Mesosphere's DCOS, built on Apache Mesos, provides developers an API to automate allocation and deallocation of datacenter resources to run today's most popular distributed applications, like Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, and Google’s Kubernetes (all natively supported by Mesosphere DCOS). A software development kit (SDK) aids quickly building applications that scale with built-in high availability and fault tolerance. The Mesosphere DCOS supports Linux applications and runs with Amazon AWS, Google GCE, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and VMware vCloud Air. The Mesosphere DCOS also runs on-premise on bare metal or on top of a virtualized private cloud, such as with VMware or OpenStack.

"Today's applications and services have outgrown single servers," said Florian Leibert, CEO and cofounder of Mesosphere. "The datacenter needs an operating system. The Mesosphere DCOS automates common operations and makes your entire datacenter programmable. We want to give developers the power of the underlying resources without forcing them to worry about the complexity of spanning hundreds or even thousands of machines. We are making modern, distributed systems as easy to build and operate as if they were running on a single machine."

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